Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities in Cross-Media News Work

Global Journalism Education: Challenges and Innovations, 2017

Technology is typically seen as an instrument that aids journalistic processes. Digital artifacts, however, are seldom considered as active participants. Tautologically, journalism is defined as a practice of journalists. But journalism would not be the same without the role played by technological artifacts. To assess such a problem, this article discusses the ontological contributions from actor-network theory and how they may help to disclose the complex associations between a multiplicity of actors involved in journalism. Besides asking " who " does journalism, we argue that it is also necessary to assess " what " does journalism. We then show how technological actants transform journalistic practices in two recent processes: newsroom convergence and the creation of news by algorithms. Finally, we argue that this new ontology demands epistemological and methodological transformations in journalism studies.

, International Communication Gazette volume 75, no. 1, 2013, pp. 76-98., 2013

The move to a networked media environment presents a range of challenges to journalistic roles, norms and daily practices. The article employs Actor Network Theory to investigate how different actors negotiate and ultimately shape the manner in which the internet and related digital technologies are embedded in the newsroom. Findings suggest that professional culture –articulated in skills, ideas and practices- acts as a network that weakens the potential impact of technology towards innovation and audience-oriented models of journalism. The results point to the conclusion that the internet and related tools are seen as empowering journalists to do their (traditional) jobs better rather than moving on to the next stage built around a stronger commitment to capitalize on the growing socio-technical potential.

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 2008

For a media profession so central to society's sense of self, it is of crucial importance to understand the influences of changing labour conditions, professional cultures, and the appropriation of technologies on the nature of work in journalism. In this paper, the various strands of international research on the changing nature of journalism as a profession are synthesized, using media logic as developed by 1991) and updated by Dahlgren (1996) as a conceptual framework. A theoretical key to understanding and explaining journalism as a profession is furthermore to focus on the complexities of concurrent disruptive developments affecting its performance from the distinct perspective of its practitioners -for without them, there is no news.

The move to a networked media environment presents a range of challenges for journalistic roles, norms and daily practices. This article employs actor network theory to investigate how different actors negotiate and ultimately shape the manner in which the internet and related digital technologies are embedded in the newsroom. Findings suggest that professional culture -articulated in skills, ideas and practices -acts as a

2014

Journalism Studies, 2010

. The project is carried out in a partnership of university-based researchers and analysts from one of the major newspaper publishers in Denmark, and presents the first user-based analysis of the relative position of each individual news medium in the entire news media matrix.

Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies, 2011

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2020

This Special Issue tackles the important challenge of engaging with and advancing theoretical and conceptual debates on current and future direction of journalism and communication studies in a rapidly changing media landscape. As the global digital ecosystem reconfigures empirical realities in media and communication (Carlson & Lewis, 2015; Örnebring et al., 2018; van Dijck, 2013; Zelizer, 2004), established analytical frameworks for media production and professional practice, as well as for media circulation and representation, cannot be taken for granted anymore. In fact, changes in media landscapes associated with globalization and digitization demand new conceptual frameworks and call for reflexive understandings of what changes and what persists in professional practice, media industries, and journalistic cultures more widely. Most importantly, globalization has exposed the Western bias of much of the field's theoretical and conceptual work (Gunaratne, 2010; Willems, 2014), which privileges and universalizes Western media, journalism practices, and politics. With Westerncentrism reproduced over generations of scholars, the inequality between "the West" and "the rest" has divided our disciplinary viewpoint between the theory-producing West and the empirically testing "rest of the world" as a matter of deviation from standard models. The normalization of this hierarchical divide is the first assumption that this special issue challenges. Alongside changes associated with globalization, digitization has destabilized much of what is taken for granted in journalism and communication studies, including theories and concepts that have unproblematically reproduced assumptions about the hegemony of legacy media, journalistic practice as a clearly defined professional practice, and the uncompromising divides between media professionals and audiences (

The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism, 2016

This chapter review the literature on journalism and technology, beginning with a more expansive conceptualization of human and machines in journalism. We acknowledge two specific social actors in new media organizations (namely, technologists and journalists) in addition to developing a more complex representation of technological actants — their inscription by humans and their corresponding influence within net- worked arrangements. Then, after zooming out to accommodate that wide-angle view, we zoom in on the particular case of news production and distribution. Drawing on power-dependence theory (Emerson, 1962), the chapter concludes by briefly conceptualizing four facets that illustrate how journalism becomes 'technologically specific' (Powers, 2012): how it becomes defined by, embedded in, and understood through the particular structural and sociocultural characteristics of technology. The four facets that we propose — (1) human-centric journalism, (2) technology-supported journalism, (3) technology-infused journalism, and (4) technology-oriented journalism — help bring into focus the relative dependence on technology that is evident in different forms of journalism, and the implications of such dependence for theory and practice.